Your Life In Harleys
Your life in Harleys
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
THE POET T.S. ELIOT CLAIMED HE HAD measured out his life with coffee spoons, which I suppose is fine, in an introverted, shut-in kind of way, but only last week I discovered a slightly more colorful medium for marking the passage of time: Harley-Davidsons.
Yep. Through a set of convoluted relationships in which I rode to Milwaukee with a friend who has a buddy who used to know a guy in high school, I was granted a rare opportunity to walk through that Upper Room of American motorcycle lore, the Harley-Davidson Archives on Juneau Avenue.
This is the place where Harley stores not only its entire paper trail-production records, catalogs, owner’s manuals, etcbut also a representative sampling of motorcycles, most of them brand-new and right off the assembly line, stretching back to 1903.
Most of these historic bikes are destined for the new Harley-Davidson Museum in downtown Milwaukee next year, but for right now they are crowded, cheek by jowl, into the upstairs of a red brick building at the old factory, accessible only to those engaged in serious research-or to some lout like me who accidentally tags along with his buddy.
Nevertheless, the man in charge of the Archives (who asked not to be named so his phone doesn’t ring off the hook with people wanting to know if the green headlight wire should be routed to the left or right of the steering head on the 1947 Knucklehead) was very gracious and friendly, and he guided my friends and me on a stroll through the caged collection of bikes for most of a cold and gray winter afternoon.
Harley-Davidson is probably alone in all the industrial world for having set aside a sampling of its products going back for more than 100 years. I’m told Coca-Cola has a similar museum, but-let us face itthat shapely 6-ounce bottle you got at the gas station in the Fifties just doesn’t have the same mojo as a perfectly preserved Hydra-Glide.
Luckily for those of us who are easily confused, Harley has lined up its archival bikes chronologically with a model-year plate on each front fender. So you can walk down the row and say to yourself, “There’s a bike you could have bought the year America entered WWI,” or “Here’s a Harley from 1927, the year Lindbergh flew the Atlantic...” and so on.
Historically interesting, to be sure, but I found myself moving pretty quickly through those early years of production. To be perfectly honest, one Silent Grey Fellow looks pretty much like the next to my under-trained eye. I have to force myself to soak up the differences in mechanical detail, like someone studying for an exam.
But then I came to 1948 and suddenly stopped in my tracks. A red Panhead.
“See something you like?” our curator asked.
“Came out the year I was born...”
“An important year for Harley,” he noted. “First-year Panhead, last of the old springer forks.”
We moved slowly through the Fifties Panheads and I said, “All the first bikes I saw when I was a kid looked like this. Our landlady’s son had an FL when I was 5 years old, and I used to stand in the driveway and watch him work on it. I just soaked up the whole look of the thing.”
I stared at one now and realized that somewhere in my brain there’s a file drawer marked, “Roy Rogers holster with rhinestones; Dad’s 1951 Buick; Les Paul & Mary Ford guitar music; Harley Panhead with two-tone windshield.” They’re all melted together in there somewhere.
A little farther down was the first DuoGlide, the 1958 version that finally got a swingarm. One of these was the first bike I actually rode on, at 13. Got picked up
while hitchhiking to a junkyard. Climbed on the back and knew within five miles that I had to have a motorcycle and nothing else would do.
Stroll up to 1965 and there’s the first Electra-Glide and the only electric-start Pan. Came out the year before I graduated from high school. Harleys were too heavy and conservative for me by then; I’d lost interest. They didn’t win desert races. I was a confirmed Triumph guy. With a used Honda.
In 1967, we see a touring-oriented electric-start Sportster, the XLH. I rode through Canada in the cold autumn rain with a guy who had one of these. Air Force vet, just out of the service, off to see the four corners of America. I grudgingly admitted it was a lot less hectic at 70 mph than my Honda 160.
Ah, we are on to the bad graphics of the early Seventies. But in 1977 we see Willie G’s stunning XLCR Café Racer, the first Harley I really, really wanted. Later bought one, too. Pure charisma on wheels.
And, good Lord, here’s the 1981 Heritage Edition FLH in vintage green and orange with fringed buddy seat and saddlebags. Harley’s first intentional nod to its own past. Barb and I rode one up the shoreline of California when I first worked for Cycle World, for a story called “Shooting the Coast.” Wonderful trip. “Can you still find these?” I ask our guide.
“Yeah, they turn up. And they aren’t too expensive.” Information filed.
Suddenly we’re in Evo country. There’s Barb’s 883 Sportster, my FLH Sport and green and black Road King, all in a row. A big part of my Nineties, flip-side of the Ducati addiction. This is your life, pal. And there’s my Twin Cam Electra-Glide Standard in black. Nearly froze to death on that baby, riding home from Nashville in late October.
Now we’re into the new 96-inch bikes and Sportsters with rubber-mounted engines. Haven’t ridden them yet. Might have to.
End of the line.
And here we are in the present, right now, on a cold winter day at the Harley factory. I’ll be 59 next month. But right back there, in the shadows farther down the row, is that ’48 Panhead, unfazed by the passage of years.
You can keep the coffee spoons, T.S. When I want to measure time, I’ll just go back to Milwaukee. □
